Chatterton
by Diatomaceous
Summary: While walking along St Pancras Churchyard, the poet Thomas Chatterton, much absorbed in thought, took no notice of an open grave and subsequently tumbled into it. Someone recorded that he remarked of the incident "I have been at war with the grave for some time now." Three days later, he was found dead.


**I would like to expand upon this snippet more when I have time, but for now I just wanted to get it out.**

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"You tore them up! All of them?" Lucius was livid with rage and the next moment, pale with despair.

Thomas made a choking noise and foamy spittle leaked from his mouth. He grasped feebly at his collar, managing to rip the button out of the thin cotton and expose his throat, but it did nothing to relieve the choking spasms that convulsed through him.

"I should have left you in that grave!" Lucius spat, grabbing Thomas' wrist and pulling the young man askew on the bed so that his head lolled toward the older man. "Chatterton, do you hear me?"

Thomas' face spread into the pained smile of one who's bowels are being ripped apart by poison. "I...would...gladly have...stayed," he managed before curling in on himself with retching cries.

"Boy, you can't escape me that easily!" Lucius fisted a handful of the poet's soft curls and yanked his gaze back up. "A little arsenic only fires the blood-" he flashed his fangs and pulled close to Chatterton's damp face, breathing seductively into his ear.. "-makes it spicy." He gathered up all that warm, young manhood to him, like a mother her child in an ecstasy of love, buried his face in the throbbing heartbeat at Chatterton's throat and bit deep and hard.

Thomas' whole body jerked and, at each pulsing draw of blood Lucius pulled from him, he cried out like a man in the throes of sexual ecstasy. All too soon he went still, only tremors lancing through him every few seconds. Lucius took another great drought, allowing gravity to pull them down to the bed again. He unlocked his jaws from their hold, drawing back swiftly to suppress the urge to tear out Chatterton's throat, closed his lips, drew in a deep breath and let out a sigh of one thoroughly sated.

"All that struggle, just to end up mine anyway." Lucius sat beside the bed in the scattered pile of torn pages that spilled from an open wood box. "We'll rewrite it all, through the nights to come, and oh how poignant it will be with this little, added edge." He traced a finger along Thomas' lip, watching with interest as the poet's skin went pale and all signs of distress faded from his physical form. He lay half-draped off the bed, one hand still clutching at his open shirt.

"There will be...no more nights," Thomas said, barely a whisper of breath through his lips.

The palest finger of dawn touched the horizon and Lucius felt a strange tingling in his limbs. He wondered if it was the new, young blood coursing through him. He usually didn't feel the effects of the sunrise until the sky became well lit.

But then he began to burn.

Lucius had been right. A little arsenic fires the blood, but mixed with _luminatic_, an alchemical substance Thomas had obtained in his myriad travels, it would make any liquid, even blood, burn when exposed to the slightest amount of sunlight.

Red lines appeared along all the veins in Lucius' skin. "What have you done?" he asked, curiously, then with greater trepidation: "_What have you done?"_ He almost seemed to glow like a banked fire, but then all the lines began to turn black. He suddenly became a human shaped statue of ash which completely evaporated upon tumbling apart

Thomas could feel it too, but for him Lucius had been something of a savior. When the other man had drawn so much blood forth, what was left pooled in his heart even as the organ ceased to function and he began to turn. The pain of death was less than with the arsenic, which would have taken agonizing hours of bodily torture to kill him. Now, he just closed his eyes and succumbed to a strange heat which burned itself out in a few lancing flares in his chest and temples.

If anyone had bothered with an autopsy, they would have found a beautiful, unblemished boy with his core burned to ashes.


End file.
